Re: Requiring systemd for the gnome-settings-daemon power plugin

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Fri, 2012-10-19 at 11:14 +0200, Antoine Jacoutot wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 11:00:05AM +0200, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I intend on making systemd a hard requirement for the power plugin in
> > gnome-settings-daemon. There is a lot of interactions and external
> > factors involved in making policy decision about power. This makes the
> > power plugin one of the more fragile parts of the system, with things
> > like DPMS, screensaver activation, screen locking, brightness control,
> > suspend policy, battery information exporting, all handled in the same
> > codebase.
> > 
> > Using systemd to request suspends means that:
> > - things work out of the box when people do not use GNOME (no need to
> > install acpid which then conflicts with GNOME)
> > - inhibitions are per-system instead of per-user
> > - application get more information about suspending
> > - simplify the power plugin's codebase a great deal
> > 
> > The patches I will commit are here:
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=680689
> > 
> > Additionally, and separately, support for ConsoleKit usage for
> > session-tracking will be removed.
> 
> 
> I think at one point the GNOME project will need to step up and
> explicitely states that GNOME is a Linux-only Desktop.
> I am a BSD user; don't get me wrong, if GNOME goes Linux-only then so
> be it. But the current situation is hard for us because it is unclear
> where all of this is going.
> When systemd was first mentionned on the lists, it was said it
> wouldn't be a hard requirement.

systemd wasn't a requirement to implement the features we needed. We
need other features, and the maintenance requirements are different.

>  Fair enough, we are "only" talking about the power plugin here but
> the way it is going systemd will soon be needed for more important
> features.
> I'm just wondering if it is still worth trying to maintain GNOME for !
> linux platforms (like I do on OpenBSD). Implementing some of what
> systemd provides is far from trivial for us.
> 
> To summarize, it'd be nice to know whether there is still a chance to
> see GNOME running on BSD in a near future. If everything is going
> systemd, then the answer is clear, but for now I lack the information.

Whether GNOME still works on OpenBSD is up to you, and the amount of
time and effort you're willing to spend keeping up with the "reference
implementation".

We cannot tell you when the work needed to keep up will be too big, we
also cannot tell you when the features systemd implements will be too
hard to replicate on OpenBSD.

To answer your question, if those are the only systemd changes happening
for 3.8, then GNOME 3.8 will run on OpenBSD as well as it used to, but
without multi-seat handling or power management.

Cheers